It’s how he justifies the timing of his movie, An Officer and a Murderer, which details the double life of Williams, a former commander of the Canadian Forces Base in Trenton and a predator who was convicted of first-degree murder, sexual assault, forcible confinement, and 82 attempted and successful break-ins. It stars Gary Cole, perhaps best known as the oily boss in Office Space, as Williams.

“It’s a film about a community that has been invaded by a monster,” said Leckie. “I hope people see it as that as opposed to some sensationalistic crime (movie).”

Williams’ crimes are believed to have started in 2007. He confessed to police in February 2010 and pleaded guilty to his charges in October of that year.

The film makes its Canadian debut on The Movie Network’s MExcess channel, Wednesday at 10 p.m.

The film aired in the United States a year ago.

“We were aware of the sensitive nature, that there were surviving victims, there were departed victims with families,” said Leckie, whose wife, Mary Young Leckie, was executive producer of the film. “The one thing we did not want to do was sensationalize the stories. We were telling it from the point of view of analyzing the psychopath.”

“We found the character of Russell Williams fascinating in a classic way, in (Truman) Capote’s In Cold Blood or maybe the Boston Strangler. We were fascinated by this psychopathic character; that’s where it started,” said Leckie.

That point of view also included a level of detail and accuracy Leckie said he had yet to achieve in his previous true-crime screenwriting adaptations. Leckie has made movies on the wrongfully convicted David Milgaard and the scrapped Avro Arrow project, among others.

But in An Officer and a Murderer, the attacks were accurately depicted down to how one of Williams’ surviving victims was tied up and photographed. Williams’ attacks started with break-ins that fed his fetish for panties and escalated to rape and murder,

The movie was set for release last year but was pulled from Canada despite a successful U.S. launch.

“I was very pleased with the response in the States,” Leckie said. “They seemed to indicate that it was not sensationalized, it was a very interesting examination of a psychopath, which is what I wanted it to be . . . It was the second-best-watched movie of Lifetime (the network that aired it) that season.”

Bell Media, which under Astral Media owns The Movie Network and MExcess, said the decision to delay the film in Canada was twofold.

“While we fully support the creative team behind the project, we delayed the broadcast in Canada to create some distance with the actual events,” said Scott Campbell, a spokesperson for Bell. “Airing the film in prime time before September is an obligation that fulfils a requirement of the funding agencies who co-financed the production,” he said, adding that provincial and federal grants partially funded the film.

Leckie had extensive police interviews and public trial information to draw his screenplay from.

“The interrogation is so good that as a scriptwriter you don’t have to mess with it. All you have to do is shorten it and choose a few salient points,” Leckie said.

As with all his films, Leckie contacted families of victims and police before writing. He said the police refused comment, as did the victims’ families, but some citizens of Tweed, Ont., were interviewed before writing the movie.

“I went to the homes, the houses, where things had happened and I have a wife and three kids; my emotions are really empathetic to them. I just feel that there’s a greater value to having the story told and told accurately,” Leckie said.

“I may embellish and I may fill in the blanks, but I pride myself that I tell the truth. In this, the facts may be rearranged slightly or the order of things may be rearranged: I don’t mess with the truth.”

“In my mind, it’s a complete story. We have not had that yet.”

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